please do go on! Is it useful to distinguish, for the south asian immigrants to Europe/UK/US/Aus/NZ, between barbarism directed at members of that overseas community or that which is directed at people living ‘in the homeland’? Or perhaps is that barbarism only significant when it is directed both ways simultaneously?

diasporic populations of sri lankan tamils have experience both shakedowns of overseas community members (thuggish, but barbaric, i don’t know) and the funneling of that money to the country of origin to sustain a truly barbaric conflict in which civilians led the death tolls. Random violence was insignificant overseas but significant in SL–whether or not the ‘milieu’ accommodated such barbarity. Corresponding with middle-to-upper-middle class Lankans (mostly of the majority ethnicity, not Tamils), and speaking with family, has led me to believe that the ‘milieu’ did indeed accommodate the barbarity–as the means to the end of the conflict was no less barbarous than the conflict itself.

nordics and the dutch know english. italians far less so. younger viennese i met in austria knew english, but older ones did not. i think it varies by country in europe.

Your sample of young Viennese couldn’t possibly have been representative.

The variation across countries can be largely explained with whether Hollywood movies and sitcoms are dubbed. Wikipedia has a nice map showing different dubbing practices around Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)

English music has no effect, because you don’t need to understand the lyrics to enjoy it.

The importance of english in continental europe is stagnant. It is certainly not going to replace any local languages.

One place to look at is how immigrants of different ethnicities communicate with each other. They tend to use the national language rather than english. Their level of english proficiency is usually much lower than among natives.

English teaching in school is largely ineffective and irrelevant. Only the bare basics are retained even by the upper half of the bell curve. I myself was barely able to string a coherent sentence together, despite getting good grades and having had english instruction starting with the private kindergarden I attended.
Only those who have an active interest in utilizing the language gain a functional command of it. This happened in my case only after I graduated and thanks to the internet. The internet certainly facilitates the interested few to gain a level of foreign language proficiency which would previously have been impossible to attain without extended stays in native speaking countries.

But everybody else remains stagnant with basic “tourism english” plus some domain specific vocabulary pertaining to ones profession.

I don’t see how english could get a foot in the door or achieve any critical mass to advance in importance compared to the status quo in continental europe. Improvements in translation software and the rise of China might actually diminish the importance of English in the future.

These things seem to come in 600-year cycles, but what happened to the new religions of the 1200s?

i’m skeptical of the instrumental utility of that assertion. i see your point, but i’m not sure that the phrase “stems from islam/judaism/buddhism/hinduism” is useful, because religion is so pliable. south asian non-muslims are pretty barbaric too, though in UK there’s differences due to class among non-muslim browns (sikhs are more working class and conservative than the east african hindus).

From an objective point of view, that barbarity ultimately stems from Islam itself, i.e., South Asian Muslims are more faithful to Islam than Turks and North Africans are. But the degree of faithfulness to Islam depends on the culture of the Muslim community (Turks and North Africans are more in tune with the Western world than South Asian Muslims are – its reasons are complicated – so they are less faithful to Islam).

no surprise, south asians are more barbarous in their practice of islam than turks or north africans. (see the extreme conservatism of south asian muslims in britain vs. the greater moderation of french or german muslims)

Like my mother, but my mother also used to (she is dead now) go swimming with a typical one-piece female swimsuit on summer holidays.

I feel that their ultimate goal is creating a language bridge sufficiently strong to create a kind of mix-language by which Chinese will be able to better integrate in the world, and foreign better to equipped to do business with China. Right now, the difficulties of the Chinese language are a great barrier for many foreigners.

But where will these trends take Chinese, eventually? Will Mandarin (/Cantonese) change significantly to adapt itself to this new intermediary role?

Traditional Islamic values are often very non-modern and in conflict with the world of today and very likely tomorrow. Muslims should be more moderate people in order to be integrated more into the world. Religion shouldn’t be something that estranges people from the world no matter what the original message of that religion is, at least that would be one of my criteria if I happened to decide to convert to a religion.

But Chinese do not spread their language beyond their borders, at least they do not have an active or efficient state policy for that. They seem completely comfortable with English when communicating with foreigners and they even encourage the learning of English as a second language as a state policy.

From my totally representative sample (n=1), it seems that the urban middle/upper classes also consider Punjabi/Sindhi/whatever as their native, everyday language. That’s what they speak at home. Urdu is regarded as a literary language and as a lingua franca – except, again, for a specific ethnic group who happen to be native Urdu speakers.

p.s. from what i hear the french pretend to know less english than they really do!

This is 100% true if you establish communication directly in English. They (we) perceive your assumption that everybody should speak your language as some kind of cultural imperialism (“Those yanks/brits, who do you think they are?”)

However, if you make even a feeble attempt at communicating in French, and if you can survive the patronising smiles that your attempt is bound to elicit, they’ll bend over backwards to communicate in whatever broken “Angliche” they know. Try it!

(Prediction: the very same thing will happen in China a few decades from now, when more Chinese people know English – and for the same reasons).

On another point, I encounted a poor migrant in Morocco (aspiring migrant I think. Not really mobile at that time). Anyhow they wanted an English-French dictionary so as to learn English. The drive and desperation of African migrants to get to Europe, learn English, get a job and a better life, is truly something to see.

They would crawl under the tour buses in order to illegally enter, clinging to the bottom. Sadly for them, the tour operators were wise to the game and inspected the buses specifically for this. The bus drivers even knew exactly how many people would fit in the undercarriage!

Reminded me of the waves of migrants from Central and South America, heading to North. It’s like a force of nature.

re #28, modern. i think part of the issue is that asian societies have accepted a lot of western values, especially exoteric ones (dress), that muslims reject. more fundamentally muslims have attitudes toward religious freedom which are now only found in totalitarian gov’s in other parts of the world. additionally, in muslim countries this constraint is as much bottom-up as top-down (as opposed to china, where it’s more a top down issue). though i should probably be more precise/clear about indices of barbarization.

modern western, medieval western or both (if so, how much from each?)?